


Memory

by Carenejeans



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 09:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28349214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carenejeans/pseuds/Carenejeans
Summary: Methos is beset by dreams and ghosts from his past.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 24
Collections: Highlander Holiday ShortCuts 2020





	Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teshuan](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=teshuan).



_Methos stood on a rise near the edge of the oasis, watching the horizon. Nothing but sand between the oasis and the thin line between the earth and the blue sky, not a cloud, not a wind-devil, not the peculiar wisp of dust that rose over a caravan on its way to the oasis. Someone touched his arm softly and he turned, smiling. But she laughed and backed away from him, her hair flying around her shoulders, hiding her face. He tried to catch her, but a strong wind had come up, blowing sand into his eyes and making him stumble. The sand moved beneath his feet, sucking him down. "No--"_

  
"No!" Methos sat up in his bed, gasping for air. The dream faded away. The oasis, gone. The girl whose face he tried to see, night after night -- gone. The room was still and dark, the window brightened by the artificial light of the city. Methos groaned and swung his legs over the side of the bed. "Damn it." He reached for a pen and the journal he kept by his bed.

  
_Dreamed of the oasis again. This time she touched me, then danced away out of reach, her hair concealing her face. Long vista of empty desert stretching to horizon: check. Sandstorm: check. Obvious parallel to my first death: check. Who is she? Why can't I see her face? Why can't I remember her?_

  
Methos put the journal away and padded into the kitchen. He wanted alcohol but made coffee. He put rum in the coffee and picked up a newspaper lying on the counter, folded open to an article. He carried it to the kitchen table with his coffee. He tapped the side of the table with it a few times, unsure of whether he wanted to look at it again, then sighed and spread it out on the table. This was where it had started.

  
It was just a short newsy report on an ancient oasis settlement found buried in the Egyptian desert. A window into the lives of the oasis dwellers, the article said. Graffiti on a rock. What appeared to be a classroom assignment on a wall. It was found in an area thought to be lacking in archaeological interest.

  
Methos was naturally curious about archeological discoveries near his old stomping grounds, but the report on this one had made the back of his neck prickle. The body of a woman had been found buried near the oasis. More bodies were found scattered nearby. Only the woman's body showed signs of any kind of funeral rites having been performed. Possibly, the article suggested, a cataclysm of some kind had occurred. Perhaps a sandstorm.

  
_The body of a woman. More bodies scattered. Perhaps a sandstorm._ The date was right, more or less. Give or take a hundred years.

  
He rubbed his eyes with his palms. Obviously, this article was the genesis for his dreams. He'd read it, set it aside, put it out of his mind. Or so he thought. How did that old song go? _My mind's got a mind of its own…_ his was obviously working on something. On overtime, as it were. Methos sighed and sipped his coffee and rum, thinking.

  
The room suddenly darkened, then lightened as if someone had turned a switch off and on.

  
Methos reached for his sword even before he felt the faint but unmistakable charge of an immortal presence. The scent of the desert filled the room. He'd know that smell anywhere -- Camels, sweat, jasmine, smoke from cooking fires, marjoram, the tang of cool water and hot desert sand. It went straight to his hind-brain and held him for a moment between present and past.

  
A boy stood by the window, staring at Methos as if were a strange puzzle.

  
Methos stared back. The immortal presence from the boy was faint and whispery, but it was there. He lowered his sword, but didn't let go of it.

  
"How did you get in here?" It seemed a fair question.

  
A streetlight lit the boy's face as he tilted his head. He seemed bewildered, out of place. He looked out of place, too, Methos thought. Well, his hair would fit into the modern world well enough. But that linen kilt was a bit too cutting edge, even for Seacouver.

  
The boy folded his arms across his bare chest and stared.

  
"Well," Methos sat on the edge of his bed facing the intruder -- _apparition?_ "Let's introduce ourselves. I'm Methos. You are --?"

  
The boy continued to stare at him. Methos tried again. "Methos," he said, pointing at himself. He pointed at the boy. "You?"

  
A slight frown touched the boy's face. He pointed at himself and spoke -- a quick string of words that Methos didn't understand but caused an itch at the edges of his mind.

  
"Yes, you." Methos patiently repeated his introduction, pointing at himself. "Methos."

  
The boy tilted his head again, looking slightly impatient in a way that was oddly familiar. He seemed to come to a decision and pointed at himself. "Methos."

  
"No, _I'm--_ " Methos began, but he was speaking to an empty room.

  
The boy had vanished.

  
Methos tossed the bottle of rum into the trash and brewed a pot of his strongest, blackest and most caffeineated coffee and sat down heavily in his chair by the window, his journal in his lap. If he'd fallen back to sleep and into his dreams he was certainly awake now, sipping coffee that scalded his tongue. The winter nights were long, and cold. But this night seemed colder, and longer, that even the solstice, a few days away, couldn't match.

  
_So now_ , he wrote, _I've got a ghost to go along with the dreams. Speaking a language I almost remember. They say, don't they, that the winter solstice is a time of renewal, of death and rebirth, the time of the year when the walls that separate this world from the next are stretched thin, allowing supernatural wanderers, mysterious strangers, spirit-guides, and ancestors to pass through. A crossroads._

_  
_Well, if it was a crossroads, his ancestors and spirit-guides were backing up traffic. Methos closed his journal, frowning. He sighed, stuffed the newspaper into his bag, and got dressed. Then, alone with his less tangible ghosts, he waited for the morning.

  
\----------

  
"The thing is, I can never see her face," Methos said.

  
Duncan was painting a wall in the dojo that had looked fine to Methos. He'd been roped into helping, which he was doing from the sidelines. He handed Duncan a roller. "I feel I should remember her, that it's _important_ that I do. "

  
"You remember the other people in these dreams, right?" Duncan rolled a perfectly straight stripe of paint onto the wall. Methos admired it. "You see _their_ faces?"

  
"Well…" he considered. "Yeah, I can see them, not clearly enough to pick them out of a line-up, but I know who they are. Of course, I forget as soon as I look away, but I _remember_ remembering them." He shrugged. "Dream logic."

  
"Hm," Duncan filled his roller with paint.

  
"Have your memories of your clan -- faded at all?" Methos asked hesitantly.

  
Duncan drew himself up indignantly, then deflated a bit. "I don't want to say so, but yeah, they have."

  
Methos nodded, thinking back four hundred years.

  
" _Some_ of them are more vivid than I'd like," Duncan said, applying another neat stripe of paint.

  
Memories of his father, Methos thought. Of Debra.

  
"Debra was your first, wasn't she?" he ventured.

  
"Yes," Duncan said.

  
They fell silent for a moment. Duncan painted. Methos watched him.

  
"I think this woman was my first --" Methos stopped.

  
Duncan turned to him in surprise. "Your first wife?"

  
Methos hesitated. "Maybe. I don't remember much from that time. Certainly not a wife..." He trailed off.

  
"You told me when we first met it was more of a blur," Duncan prompted.

  
"Most of it. From what I can remember and what I've pieced together -- modern archeology is a wonderful thing, by the way -- I lived in a smallish oasis community in Egypt. Farmers, basically. Traders came through and we bartered what we grew or made, but we didn't leave the oasis. Then the water dried up and the people, my family, packed up to leave. They were all killed in a sandstorm before they got very far. I died along with them, but --" he grimaced.

  
Duncan's roller paused halfway up the wall, then went on. "Right."

  
"At the time -- this I do remember -- I thought I had just survived due to a kind of tragic luck."

  
Duncan nodded, his face set. He painted.

"It's odd," Methos said slowly. "Awake, my memory of that time is still a blur. But the dreams are detailed. Like a movie." He made a sweeping gesture as if conjuring a theater screen. "On a big screen in technicolor." He sighed. "Until it all disappears. I'm not sure if it's really all still up here somewhere," he tapped his head. "Or if my subconscious mind is just riffing, making it up. Either way," he said somewhat peevishly, "you'd think it would give me a glimpse of her face. The dreams seem to go out of their way to hide it."

  
Duncan put the roller down and stood looking at Methos, his arms crossed over his chest. "Maybe there's something you want to forget."

  
"Probably," Methos agreed.

  
Duncan handed him a paintbrush. Methos smiled and went to work.

  
\----------

  
"Do you still have bad dreams, Joe?" Methos rubbed his hands together and blew on them. It was cold outside. The bar was warm. Welcoming. Modern. Joe had hung bunches of holly over a railing near the bar. Old fashioned but modern.

  
"Of Vietnam?" Joe poured them both drinks. "Yeah."

  
Methos took a drink and set his glass carefully on the bar in front of him. "I've been having dreams. Of my first death."

  
"Understandable," Joe said.

  
"And I've got a ghost."

  
"A ghost," Joe said. "Like, clanking chains and moaning?"

  
"More or less. He came into my flat and stood by my window and stared at me."

  
"That's it? You're sure you weren't dreaming?"

  
"Actually -- no. But it felt real, Joe. Humor me."

  
"Okay, say he was there. Who was he?"

  
"A ghost from my old neighborhood. Someone born about the same place as I was." He took a sip from his drink. "Around the same time."

  
"Ghosts don't exist," Joe said reasonably.

  
"But if he was real--"

  
"Couldn't have been," Joe said. "There's no record--"

  
Methos waved that away. "There was no record of _me_ , for a long time."

  
Joe smiled wryly. "There were a hell of a lot of records of you."

  
"Yes, but they weren't all connected to the same individual."

  
"Yeah, well, _someone_ made sure of that."

  
"Don't hold a grudge, Joseph. You found out, didn't you? Eventually." He held up his hand as Joe started to sputter. "My visitor can't be real; think about it. If he was an old immortal, he'd speak English--"

  
Joe laughed shortly. "French, German, Chinese, Greek…"

  
"Well, he wouldn't be babbling away in ancient Egyptian."

  
"Ancient Egyptian, huh?"

  
"I think so. I haven't heard it spoken in a while."

  
"Maybe he's been buried in the desert," Joe said.

  
Methos shuddered. "God. But no, if that was the case he'd have revived into a world so strange --"

He stopped and gulped down the rest of his drink. "It doesn't bear thinking about. But it's hardly likely he'd have found me. On the other side of a world he couldn't begin to navigate?" Methos rubbed his temples. "I'm getting a headache."

  
"Another?" Joe said sympathetically.

  
Methos nodded and Joe refilled his glass.

  
"Fine," Methos said, as if Joe had been arguing the point. He turned his glass between his fingers. "I have no use for ghosts, Joe."

  
Joe pointed his glass at Methos. "Don't you?"

  
Methos closed his eyes. _Do I?_ Like Joe, he'd always scoffed at the idea of ghosts -- at least Christmas-Carol apparitions that delivered cryptic messages then faded back into the wallpaper.

_  
_But the ghosts that lived in your subconscious mind for years and decades and millennia only to come roaring out of the past when you least expected them — _those_ ghosts he believed in absolutely.

  
Methos walked out of the bar into a gloom that was only partly due to the twilight. The streets of Seacouver were busy as usual, full of noisy cars and people in a hurry. Or people taking their time, window-shopping, talking, hanging out, out on an evening walk in pairs or groups or alone like he was. Tonight there was a sort of filmic quality about it all, shadowy images of the past superimposed over the city street -- of people hurrying, walking, relaxing in a different time, a different place. Methos felt he was walking between time, standing where past and present moved close together like different currents in a stream. Or at a crossroads.

He sat down on a bench and closed his eyes. Sometimes, a memory from his distant past would surface -- just a fragment, a glittering shard without context, a sudden rush of feeling, and he would try to capture it. Sometimes it faded. Sometimes it didn't. He let one of the captured fragments play across his mind. He was lying on a mat laid out on the sand of the oasis, looking up at a moonless sky streaked with falling meteors. A woman was lying beside him; she gasped in wonder and delight, and Methos reached out to take her hand.

Methos shivered and opened his eyes, almost expecting to see her there on the bench. She wasn't, of course. But at least he knew she had been there beside him, watching a meteor shower five thousand years ago. Even if he could no longer see her face.

  
\----------

  
Maybe, Methos decided, if he tried to work it out while he was awake, his mind would stop going into overdrive while he slept and the dreams would stop.

  
He attacked the problem systematically. He sat down at his table and wrote down everything he remembered or thought he remembered from his life in the oasis. He wrote longhand so the memories would flow from brain to hand to paper. He switched to typing on his laptop so it would flow faster. He free-associated without stopping to think, to cultivate the element of surprise. He wasn't surprised when it turned out to be drivel. He closed his eyes and spoke into a recorder, listened to what he'd said, and went back to writing. He wrote drunk. He wrote sober. He wrote under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms, and was fascinated by the result, though it didn't get him any forwarder. He made a list.

  
_Possible reasons why I've blocked the memory of this woman:_

_  
Her death was too painful to face when it happened (and the muddled and terrifying times just after, learning what I was and how to survive, just drove the memory deeper into hiding)._

_  
We had a falling-out of some kind right before her death._

_  
The falling-out was my fault, and the pain of guilt was too much to bear._

_  
The falling-out was her fault, and the pain of her death added to heartache was too much to bear._

_  
The oasis people became embroiled in a village feud of epic, but obviously small-scale proportions, and this woman and I were on opposite sides. Something romantic and bloody; an ancient Egyptian version of Montagues and Capulets. Hatfields and McCoys. Corleones and Barzinis._

_  
_Methos rubbed his temples. This wasn't getting him anywhere. He threw down his pen, put on his jacket, and headed out the door.

  
\----------

  
"Maybe she divorced you," Amanda said matter-of-factly. The three immortals sat at a small table at Joe's. Joe locked the door after the last customer and joined them.

  
"Leave it to a woman to think of that," Duncan said.

  
"Don't get mulish and male on me," Amanda said. "It makes sense."

  
"How?"

  
"No, she's right," Methos said. "Look at me."

  
Duncan looked at him. "And?"

  
"And this is how old I was when I died, long past marriageable age. Almost into my dotage. I should have been married for eight or nine years by the time I was this old. Then, I mean. So maybe I was."

  
"So how does divorce come into it?"

  
"It's _obvious_ , Duncan," Amanda said. "He didn't give her children. A perfectly good reason. At the time."

  
Duncan looked at Methos.

  
Methos shrugged. "She has a point."

  
"So if she divorced him, and broke his heart, maybe he's holding a grudge --"

  
"My subconscious mind is holding a grudge," Methos corrected her, as if his subconsciousness was a fractious character separate from himself. " _I_ don't remember a grudge."

  
"Deep in his ancient brain he's angry, and hurt, and doesn't _want_ to see her."

  
"I don't know," Duncan said. "It sounds a bit --"

  
"Jerry Springer? Ann Landers?" Methos said.

  
"Something like that. But up-to-date."

  
"Ah, that would be Captain Awkward."

  
Duncan shook his head. "I don't want to know."

  
"But there's a worse scenario," Methos said.

  
"Worse?" Amanda said.

  
"I could have divorced _her_." Methos said. Even saying it made him wince.

  
"But you don't remember why," Duncan said.

  
"No, but the usual reasons come to mind. Adultery, unreconcilable differences, or because -- as the culture of the time would have seen it, which would include me -- _she_ didn't give _me_ a son." He made a face. "This is depressing."

  
"Another scenario," Joe said suddenly. "Worst case." Duncan and Amanda looked at him.

  
Methos closed his eyes.

  
"I didn't kill her, Joe," he said quietly.

  
They all looked at the table. Nobody spoke.

  
"No," Methos said softly. "I didn't kill her -- nor did she kill me, for that matter." He paused. "I've got no evidence for or against, it's just a feeling. If something very bad happened, it was not by my hand."

  
\----------

  
Methos woke with a start, a vivid dream of running through a cold, bleak desert fading into shadows. It was still dark, that restless darkness just before dawn. He half sat up, rubbing his face and muttering. Then all of his senses picked up the presence of someone else in the room.

  
"You again." Methos hadn't meant to say it aloud. But there he was, standing at the window, half-shadowed, half-lit by the city lights. He'd been looking down into the street, but hearing Methos's voice he turned around, with the same peculiar, focused stare he'd had on his face the first time he'd appeared.

  
"What do you want?" Methos said. He felt more exasperated than afraid, though his skin prickled unpleasantly.

  
The boy stared. Methos sighed. "Another staring contest, then? Fine." He examined the boy more carefully. Had he changed? He seemed a bit older -- in human years at least. Taller, leaner, more muscled. He was wearing a long linen kilt and what Methos supposed nowadays would be called a hoodie, both garments made of hand-woven linen. Not the worst, not the best. On his feet were sandals. Methos had the impression he was dressed for a party. He suddenly pulled something long and thin from behind him -- as if out of the air -- and Methos tensed, thinking at first it was a sword.

  
It was a long flute.

  
"Ah, good," Methos said, relieved. "Haven't seen one of those in -- quite a while."

  
The boy nodded. Unsmiling, he raised the flute to his lips and began to play.

  
It was a slow tune, and somewhat mournful. It sounded vaguely familiar, calling to mind ethnographic recordings made in deserts, outbacks, mountain ridges, every back-of-the-back-of-beyond place where such things lived on as the outside world left them behind.

  
The boy stopped, stared a moment, then began a new tune.

  
Methos frowned and shook his head.

  
The boy stopped, looking frustrated. Then he spoke, an irritated jumble of words Methos had little trouble translating as "come on, you know this one, _pay attention._ " Methos wished that he had a tape recorder. Maybe he should set one up in case this was somehow real and not a dream.

  
Then the boy lifted the flute to his lips once more and began to play a lilting, catchy tune.

  
"It has a nice beat and you can dance to it -- _Oh_." Methos froze. For suddenly the tune seemed to enter his body, not just through his ears but through his skin, his bones, all the way down to his questionable DNA. He knew the tune. One could, indeed, dance to it. He didn't remember the steps, but he stood up, uncertainly, his hands moving, drumming the air.

  
The boy let out a delighted string of words, and began to dance, showing Methos the steps. He played faster as Methos took up the dance, hearing the music and the voices singing and chanting, feeling the desert wind in his hair, seeing the sparks from the campfire rising to meet the stars. He felt a hand slip into his and looked down. She was dancing with him, but her face was covered by a scarf.

  
The music stopped and Methos sat heavily on the edge of his bed.

  
The boy held up the flute and made an exclamation -- one word -- and vanished.

  
Methos translated it. _Progress._

  
———-

  
"Hypnotism," Amanda said suddenly. They were gathered at Duncan's loft, sharing Chinese take-out and wine Amanda had brought that cost enough to send the three of them on a dinner date to Beijing.

  
Methos speared a potsticker with his chopsticks. "It's a thought," he said. "Do you know a hypnotist?"

  
Duncan groaned.

  
Amanda bowed. "Madame Astra," she said grandly. "Specializing in mesmerism, tarot reading, fortune-telling, love potions. Charms cast and removed. Foot reflexology and therapeutic massage."

  
"I could go for a therapeutic massage," Duncan said.

  
"Swedish and Tantric," Amanda said sweetly, sipping her wine.

  
"Tantric, please," Duncan said.

  
Methos nabbed another potsticker. "No disrespect, but I'm not sure a carnival act would do the trick."

  
"Tantric is not a carnival act! Anyway," Amanda waved a hand dismissively, "It's just a matter of getting a subject to relax, suggesting a few things to get them to free-associate, and they do the rest. It's the same whether they're in a fortune-teller's tent or a psychiatrist's office."

  
Methos settled into the couch cushions, thinking. "It couldn't hurt," he said slowly.

  
Duncan rolled his eyes. "Are you serious? You're going to let her hypnotize you?"

  
Methos shrugged. "This thing is getting to me. I'll take whatever help I can get."

  
"I won't even ask you to reveal secrets about secret stashes or safe combinations or keys to safe-deposit boxes," Amanda promised.

  
Duncan rolled his eyes and reached for his jacket. "I can't watch this. I'm going for a walk."

  
"Now that Mr. Negativity is gone," Amanda said as the lift bore Duncan away, "we can start. Let me see, we need something shiny. Too bad my costumes are in storage. I have a big gold watch that always does the trick."

  
"I'm sure you have some bling around your person somewhere," Methos pointedly glanced at her cleavage.

  
"What? Oh, this." Amanda tugged a chain around her neck and produced a diamond.

  
"Good God," Methos said. "Is it real?"

  
"Of course it's real. Do I look like a cubic zirconium kind of girl?" She plumped up a pillow on Duncan's couch. "This should do -- you've slept here, right," she said blandly, "so you should feel safe and comfortable. Here, lie down. I'll sit here." She shoved a pile of take-out containers out of the way and perched on the edge of the coffee table.

  
Methos stretched out on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, wondering what the hell he was doing. But the feeling that the memory of her face was _there_ , just out of reach of his conscious mind, was making him weary and frazzled. If this worked…

  
"This will work," Amanda assured him, as if she had read his thoughts. Maybe some of her Madame Astra act was real.

  
She swung the pendant back and forth. "Just relax and watch the diamond."

  
"That rock is as big as the Ritz," Methos said, his gaze following the opulent jewel. "Dare I ask where you got it?"

  
"Best not," Amanda smiled. "Just concentrate on the shiny light."

  
"It's hard not to," Methos said.

  
Amanda swung the diamond over Methos's face. "You're getting sleepy…"

  
Methos giggled. "Oh, come on."

  
"Sleepy," Amanda said firmly. "Look, relax your shoulders. You look like you're ready to play football."

  
Methos realized he was tense. He let his muscles relax, first his shoulders, then his arms, his legs. He watched the diamond. He yawned.

  
"There you go," Amanda said softly, as if speaking to a child at bedtime. She placed the diamond in his hand and closed his fingers around it. "Close your eyes, but think about the diamond and nothing else. Okay?"

  
"Mm," Methos said, thinking of her perfume. He forced his thoughts back to the diamond. Shiny, sparkly, stolen.

  
"The diamond is falling away. Let your mind wander -- around the room. What do you see?"

  
"Pretty woman. Chinese food."

  
Amanda smiled. "You're alone in the room. Look around. Is it bright or dark?"

  
Methos frowned. "Dark."

  
"Look into the shadows. Is there a door there?"

  
Methos, in his mind, stood in the middle of Duncan's loft, peering into the shadows. "Yes."

  
"Walk towards the door," Amanda crooned. "Can you go through it?"

  
Methos moved towards a darker shape in the shadows. It did seem to be a door, but it was almost too small for him. He bent down, feeling like Alice after a bite of Eat Me cake, and ducked through it.

  
"What do you see?" Amanda's voice seemed far away.

  
"People." Or rather, their shadows. Each going about some kind of work. It was hard to tell what they were doing. It seemed random. Fetching. Carrying. Digging. Sitting at -- he thought it might be looms, but it could be just his mind attempting to impose a pattern on random movement.

  
"Reach out," Amanda said.

  
Methos extended his hand towards one of the shadows. To his surprise, he felt a solid body. The shadow-person seemed to peer into his face and then reached out to him. Two things happened at once: the shadow-person said his name and something hit him with such violence that he sat up straight, clutching his chest.

  
"Well, that was interesting." _There are two forces at work here_ , Methos realized. The boy, who wanted him to remember the past -- and whatever was sending the dreams as a warning to forget. Two sides of his own mind?

  
"Did you see her? What happened?" Amanda's eager face swam into view.

  
Methos rubbed at this chest. "I think I'm going to need some therapeutic massage."

  
————-

  
It was the solstice, finally. Tomorrow the sun would return to chase away dreams, ghosts, the past. Tonight, there was a party. He would go, of course: it was Duncan MacLeod's birthday. But Methos was putting off heading for Joe's, feeling unsociable and unsettled. _Like someone is walking over my grave._ He felt strangely disconnected from the present, from his friends. He stood in front of his old TV set pressing the remote, flipping through programs without seeing them.

  
Then, in the split second between a re-run of _Adam-12_ and a commercial for Cialis, he felt the presence. He sighed and clicked off the TV. There had been no dream. He hadn't fallen asleep. He was watching television. Standing up. _Awake._ But the boy was sitting in his chair, his arms wrapped around his raised knees, watching him.

  
"You're back." Methos pursed his lips, thinking.

  
The boy, watching him, pursed his lips. Methos stared at him, the skin on his neck prickling.

  
As if reading his mind, the boy suddenly spoke quickly, pointing at Methos, pointing at himself.

  
"It _is_ Egyptian you're speaking, isn't it," Methos murmured, more to himself than to his visitor. "Ancient Egyptian. You're too late; nobody has spoken it for thousands of years. Including me." 

  
The boy became agitated, as if impatient with Methos's inability to understand what he was saying. Methos was frustrated because he could, he felt, _almost_ understand.

  
"Sorry," Methos said, shaking his head regretfully.

  
The boy glared at him balefully, then leapt up and spun on his heel to face the window, folding his arms across his chest and lowering his head in the timeless attitude of a pout. Methos could translate his body language much easier than his spoken one. "Idiot," his back clearly said. "I have traveled far to talk to you and yet you refuse to listen."

  
"I'm sorry," Methos said again.

  
The boy spun back to face him, his face set. Methos knew that look as well. It said "I'm going to do something I'm not supposed to do." The boy stepped closer to him and before he could react, had reached out to put a thumb in Methos's eye.

  
The surprise and pain was enough to let down the barrier between Methos and his memories. _Is this real?_ he wondered -- before both pain and rational thought were overwhelmed by the brilliant sun of another country, a clear blue sky overhead, the white sand beneath his feet, the ring of faces around him, the ring of faces known to him and dear to him. Father, mother, sister, brothers -- and the one he was trying to remember.

  
A small, brown woman, smelling of jasmine and her own sun-warmed skin. She was smiling, but her eyes held a bitter sadness. She reached for him, and as their hands touched he felt first a fierce happiness and then a piercing grief. He knew the happiness would be short, the grief longer than he could have ever imagined. She turned from him, away from the green life of the oasis. Methos stood by her and together they faced the desert, the sky, the wind, the sand, the death of everything.

  
Except himself.

  
The boy stood before him, looking somber but resolute.

  
"You," he said in the ancient language they shared, "Know that all of this is gone. Only you remain. Bear it. Endure."

  
Then he was gone and Methos was alone in his own future.

  
\----------

  
_I'm inclined to believe_ , Methos wrote in his journal, _that she died with me in the sandstorm that killed us all. I remember huddling under a cape, panicked and miserable -- and alone -- as the storm raged. But what if I wasn't alone? What if she was with me? I would have awakened, half buried in the sand, rejoicing to be alive, not yet understanding it was because of a mysterious and powerful force that would overturn the finality of death again and again -- but only for me. Not for her. She had not revived when the wind blew the sand away from us. My joy would have turned to grief; I would have buried her the best I could and walked away, even then thinking I was walking to my own death. But I survived. The Bedouins who took me in would tell me that only I, of all my people, remained. I would have felt -- survivor's guilt, they call it now. Then, I only felt shame. Guilt and shame that I also buried there in the desert._

  
Methos put down his pen and picked up his jacket. He walked through the moonlit streets of a modern city at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles and millennia away from where he was born, thinking about a woman who had lived in an oasis in the Egyptian desert, and died in a sandstorm. About a boy who reached across the centuries to tell him to _live_ , to survive though he outlived everyone he loved.

_And so I will,_ Methos thought. Until another one of his kind took his head and unleashed his life force to join with others. Or until -- what? The end of time?

  
Five millennia after his life and his death in the desert, his oasis town and his people -- _perhaps --_ had been found buried beneath the sand. His past had been literally unearthed to call him back from the present. His ghost, his dream-self, alter-ego perhaps, had come across five millennia set him straight. The past was dead. Remember it, honor it, and go forward. That's all you can do. Endure.

  
Methos looked up at the sky. The city was too bright; the stars were pale, and few. He could travel a hundred miles from the city and maybe it would feel more like home. But no. That home was long gone. His home was here, now. The stars were pale but he still walked under them. Not alone, but with his people -- a Highlander, a thief, a mortal Watcher. He walked on, to join his friends, on the longest night of the year.

  
Behind him, a shooting star flared briefly across the winter sky.

  
_\--End_

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a story outside the TV and film canon. I had been thinking about writing a story about a Christmas ghost, and happened to re-read "The Methos Chronicles, Part 1" by Don Anderson (the Highlander assistant props master) in _An Evening at Joe's_. Most of the details about Methos's early life was taken from it, but I was struck by two things in this extra-curricular story: that Methos remembered his early life so clearly, when in the episode Methos, he had told Duncan it was a blur; and that at his first death he was 28 years old and unmarried in a time and culture where men married before 20 and most people only lived into their 30s. So I took up those two slight discrepancies -- and my "ghost" appeared to try to make sense out of them.


End file.
